Any Questions? How Listening Sparks Innovation

Why are questions so important, and how should questions be used?

The skill of asking valuable questions is part of a creative mindset and opens up endless opportunities for innovation. It helps us gain valuable insights from ourselves, our colleagues, and our customers, or other people we are designing for.

Continuously asking questions helps us get below the surface, beyond the obvious, and helps us gain empathy for others, discovering the kind of human needs that lead to breakthrough innovations.

Join Paul Perrotta, sitting in for Scott Abel, for this free, one-hour webinar designed to highlight the importance of listening, especially during times of major change. Paul will be joined by Leon Segal, Ph.D., and Scott Underwood of Innovationship. The two experience design experts will share their knowledge and insights about asking questions, along with tips for the creative use of questions throughout the innovation process.

Moving from legacy systems to modern technology can be a daunting task. Depending on the number of documents you currently have, just deciding what to move can be difficult.

Join The Content Wrangler and Stephani Clark of Jorsek LLC to learn how to perform a content audit, develop a conversion plan, and learn about other considerations when transferring content.

About Stephani Clark

Stephani Clark is a Customer Success Manager for easyDITA, a DITA Component Content Management System based in Rochester. She works to train and assist users of easyDITA’s software. Stephani also works on easyDITA’s information development team and spends about half her time creating technical documentation for the software.

Before she worked for easyDITA, Stephani spent over ten years working for her family’s energy efficiency company. During that time, she worked in sales management, operations, and project management. Stephani also developed the company’s training program and served as their National Training Administrator, which brought her to Rochester in 2010 when the company opened an office there.

Chatbots have a long way to go to be self-sufficient, but if you build them on a base of structured content, they can be a helpful content delivery tool today. Join The Content Wrangler, and Patrick Bosek of Jorsek LLC to learn how you can publish your DITA content to your chatbot.

As a part of this process, Patrick will talk about how chatbots fit into your total content delivery strategy, how to transform DITA content for chatbots, and how to update and maintain chatbots as a delivery system.

About Patrick Bosek

Patrick is a co-founder and Director of Customer Success at Jorsek LLC, the makers easyDITA. Since beginning with Jorsek LLC in 2005 Patrick has worked on a wide range of projects all focused on improving authoring, production, and distribution of content. Most recently, his primary focus has been empowering the users of easyDITA and generally advancing the product documentation industry.

Patrick is a software industry professional specializing in developing, productizing, and solving problems with product content software. He is a highly skilled developer, thoughtful manager, passionate customer advocate.

Do you have Office 365 in your organization? You may not realize it, but you already have the perfect solution for delivering the right information to the right people, at the right time, in the right format and language–and on the device of their choosing.

Most content services hubs are expensive and complicated. Office 365 is an affordable, cloud-based, scalable platform that allows you to build content for a future of AI, machine-learning, chatbots, and machine-to-machine communication. It enables everyone, whether experienced in content architectures like DITA and XML or not, to use Microsoft Word and other familiar tools to create and share content in real time. Gartner recognized Microsoft as a leader in the Content Management Platform Magic Quadrant in 2017. Find out why!

Join our special guest host, Paul Perrotta, and our special guest, Steffen Frederiksen, for this free, one-hour webinar, and learn exactly why and how Office 365 is a great platform for authoring, managing, and delivering the content of the future. Attendees will also learn the benefits that come with using it, as well as be taken through a specific use case in financial services.

ABOUT STEFFEN FREDERIKSEN

Since 1989, Steffen Frederiksen has been working with the creation, management, and distribution of structured, reusable business content. This work includes methods, software tools, training workshops and CMS solutions. He has managed the training of more than 200,000 writers around the globe, primarily in the financial services, pharma, and other regulated industries.

While working for Information Mapping, Steffen developed the concept of “object-oriented information” as well as the MOM (Mapping Object Model) XML DTDs – some of the foundation of the DITA standard. With the objective of bringing the power of structured content to everyone, he founded DitaExchange in 2001 and developed its Dx4 software, which combines the DITA standard, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office.

On December 12, 2017, Steve Manning presented a discussion on how new technology will change the way we approach content. The addition of Bots, voice-enabled interfaces, and Artificial Intelligence means we must change the way we structure content. We are moving from a broadcast style of communication – publish and hope for the best – to a more conversational style of communication. More question and answer.

This imposes requirements on the content models you need to create if you want to talk to the Bots. We must be more granular in our models. We need to implement Microcontent.

Join our special guest host, Val Swisher, and Steve Manning In Part II of this series, where Steve will go a little deeper. He will discuss the language of bots/AI: intents, attributes, and assets. Then he’ll relate that to how the granularity you design into your models, the semantic labels you apply to elements, and the taxonomy you capture in creation can make or break your ability to publish DITA content to the new technologies. The session will include real-world scenarios that rely on a microcontent strategy.

Reusing content can be beneficial, but complicated to manage without proper guidelines. You can reuse content on many levels and apply different methods, from conditional filtering on entire maps to variable phrases for single words.

Join guest host Paul Perrotta, and our special guest, Gosia Radymiak, Customer Success Manager at Jorsek LLC, the makers of easyDITA, for this free, one-hour webinar. In this webinar, attendees will learn how to 1) review reuse mechanisms available in DITA; 2) learn about reuse best practices, including content organization and localization do’s and don'ts; 3) learn how to create a reuse strategy suitable for your content; and finally, 4) to get links to useful resources about DITA and reuse, including articles and training.

Join us for a panel discussion designed to help you identify—and overcome—the big challenges associated with digital product content delivery. Join host Paul Perrotta, formerly Senior Director of Information Experience at Juniper Networks, Eeshita Grover of Cisco, Craig Prior, Director of Technical Communications at Mastercard, and Joe Gelb of Zoomin Software for this lively panel discussion. The panelists will share lessons learned that you can use to develop a streamlined content delivery process that takes advantage of modern content creation and management practices, and prepares your content to support emerging delivery technologies such as chatbots, voice interfaces, the Internet of Things, and augmented reality.

Attendees will learn about:
–Increasing speed to delivery without sacrificing quality
–Having consistent access to all of your technical content, no matter the source format
–Exposing the right content to the right audience
–The value of scenario-based content design
–Optimizing the maintainability of content over time
–Building trust around your content
–Preparing your content to support emerging technologies

Technology is increasingly important to every enterprise's initiatives, but with dozens of alternatives, do you have the right solution? Thinking about divorcing your current vendor? Looking to adopt new technology from scratch? This session is for you.

Rather than selecting technology based on a ratings spreadsheet or who plays golf with your boss, we'll offer a more practical — and effective! — approach. This webinar deals the straight dope on pitfalls to avoid and reliable paths to follow.

You'll learn about the most important criteria when creating a shortlist, what should really be in that (brief) RFP, and how to plan a vendor demo that's meaningful and useful to you. So stop selecting the wrong technology. Here's a better way to ensure you make the right choice.

ABOUT JARROD GINGRAS

Jarrod Gingras is Real Story Group’s Managing Director and an analyst covering Digital Workplace and Marketing technologies. As a conference speaker and consultant, he regularly advises some of the world’s largest and most complicated enterprises on their enterprise information challenges.

Prior to joining Real Story Group, Jarrod worked as a web developer, information architect and user interface designer at a systems integration firm, where he developed user-focused content management strategies and solutions for clients in a multitude of industries.

Leading teams is hard. One single team member can bring you down - from halting your improvement plans to a complete breakdown of key operating functions and alienation of customers. Because of that, the answers to the question of whom to hire and whom to keep are vital when automation shrinks your workforce.

The equation involves many make-or-break variables, including the balance of skills and experience, mix of styles, personalities, and relationships, and diversity of natural talents and strengths. To further complicate things, each variable must also be consistent with the executive agenda as well as the team lead’s personal leadership style and strengths profile.

In this webinar, Andrew Lawless will share the best-working tools and strategies from 20 years of transforming teams with the goal of teaching you about a five-step approach to transforming your team.

This webinar is for you if you are dealing with team members who are smart, capable, and competent, but struggle to agree with your changes, wrestle with automation, or fail to meet new job requirements. You will learn about methodologies that help you understand which team members to keep, coach, or transition.

TAKEAWAYS

1. Understand each team member’s view of the world
2. Show a different scenario or reality
3. Disrupt counter-productive behavior
4. Attract and keep the right talent
5. Initiate small changes in the right direction

ABOUT ANDREW LAWLESS

Andrew Lawless is a best-selling author, performance coach, educator, and consultant. He elevates senior executives and business owners to success, sanity, and happiness in business and life. He brings a unique blend of experience in behavioral sciences, publishing, localization, and education. He served as a trainer and consultant to the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit where he helped analyze the mindset of hostage takers.

Humans are hardwired for communicating with visuals. Learn some eye-opening statistics on engagement with video and images, as well as some best practices for improving your marketing and social media videos. Learn how you can use video and visuals to better engage your customers.

Join Val Swisher, sitting in for Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Ryan Knott, Public Relations Specialist at TechSmith, for this free, one-hour webinar. Attendees will learn why visuals and video are so important to your marketing content, why perfection is killing your marketing videos, and three easy ways to improve your video process.

Validating content is a core component of the modern TechComm process, but often there are still far too many manual processes. Manual checking and validation is inefficient, error-prone, and supremely not fun.

Join Paul Perrotta sitting in for Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Patrick Bosek, co-founder of Jorsek LLC, the makers of easyDITA, for this free, one-hour webinar. In this webinar, Patrick will go through a set of tools that demonstrates how validation can be mostly automated, making your life easier and ultimately producing better results.

Ten years ago, The Content Wrangler published details about a survey that found most documentation managers don’t use metrics as a performance measure. Has that changed? Have documentation managers stuck to their old, metric-less ways, or have they all become “quants” in 10 years’ time?

Join Paul Perrotta, sitting in for Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Barry Saiff, CEO of Saiff Solutions. Barry is the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Technical Communications Leaders, and a 30-year veteran documentation leader. He will lead a discussion about the ins and outs of calculating costs and return on investment for documentation projects.

Attendees will learn from the results of a real-world case study of a technical documentation project that required technical writing, technical illustrations, and a couple of key metrics: cost per page and pages per date. You’ll learn how difficult it was for the team to track, calculate, and report these seemingly simple numbers and how they overcame these challenges. You’ll discover the connection between measurement and process design and learn valuable lessons that should help you avoid getting lost in the weeds of data- and cost-tracking.

Are you thinking about incorporating tone into your content strategy? If so, you've probably seen how confusing this topic can be.

We know, because we are human beings, that language can misfire. Tone is where understanding and emotion come together – and sometimes that’s messy.

Join Paul Perrotta, sitting in for Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Pierre Gagnier, Content Strategist at ADP Innovation Lab, for this free, one-hour webinar. Pierre will show you how a team of researchers at ADP were able to tame some of the trickiness of tone and measure its impact. What they learned will help you to make sense of tone and change it from a source of risk into a tool for creating effective content.

Attendees will learn about 1) a simple, workable set of definitions that you can use to promote shared understanding among stakeholders of what tone is; 2) A framework for identifying and applying tone attributes so that you can create a foundation for consistent practice, and 3) Some typical factors that will help you to see how tone can go awry and will help you create your own risk factors.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Pierre Gagnier is a content strategist at ADP's Innovation Lab in New York. He works extensively with user experience researchers to help ADP web and mobile product teams align their content strategies consistently with users' realities.

In 2013, GOV UK, the government services website for the United Kingdom, won the prestigious D&AD Black Pencil for its contribution to moving content forward as a design discipline. Since then GOV UK has been name-checked and modeled around the world as *the* way to do public sector content. And yet, aside from those who are really “in the know,” the practice of content design is still little known outside of government content circles. And inside of government, many people talk about it, but not many know how to do it well.

Join Paul Perrotta, sitting in for Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and his special guest, Padma Gillen, of Scroll UK, for this free, one-hour webinar. Formerly Head of Content Design for the UK's Government Digital Service, Padma has been at the heart of this emerging discipline since its earliest days. He now teaches others how to do it, and helps organizations rebuild their entire content function around the principles of user needs, designing with data and agile content production.

In this webinar, Padma will introduce you to these principles and explain how to incorporate them into your approach. Attendees will learn how to place the needs of users at the heart of your content strategy, apply agile methods to content production, and learn to understand the governance models needed to improve your content significantly.

We’ve all heard about the benefits of content modeling and structured content for technical information. We’ve implemented DITA or other topic-based strategies to break content into smaller blocks to manage and publish, but topics are not small enough.

But the addition of Bots, voice-enabled interfaces, and AI means we must change the way we structure content. We are moving from a broadcast style of communication – publish and hope for the best – to a more conversational style of communication. More question and answer. This imposes requirements on the content models you need to create if you want to talk to the Bots. We must be more granular in our models. We need to implement Microcontent.

Join Val Swisher, sitting in for Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and her special guest, Steve Manning of Precision Content, for this webinar. Steve will discuss how new technology will change the way we approach content and the topic-based approach to deliver what you need for the new technology challenges. Steve will work through a different approach to the content that focuses you more on reader outcomes how that affects your content models. Attendees will learn how deep into their content then need to model to get the most from chatbots, voice-enabled systems, and ultimately AI.

Attendees will also learn 1) Why traditional topic-based DITA is not granular enough for the future; 2) How microcontent is a better approach to future-proof your content, and 3) How to use user outcomes to drive models and granularity.

The skill of asking valuable questions is part of a creative mindset and opens up endless opportunities for innovation. It helps us gain valuable insights from ourselves, our colleagues, and our customers, or other people we are designing for.

Continuously asking questions helps us get below the surface, beyond the obvious, and helps us gain empathy for others, discovering the kind of human needs that lead to breakthrough innovations.

Join Paul Perrotta, sitting in for Scott Abel, for this free, one-hour webinar designed to highlight the importance of listening, especially during times of major change. Paul will be joined by Leon Segal, Ph.D., and Scott Underwood of Innovationship. The two experience design experts will share their knowledge and insights about asking questions, along with tips for the creative use of questions throughout the innovation process.

Are you ready for how AI, machine learning, and other future technology will affect content development?

The database revolution changed our relationship to data, making it reusable for different target audiences, contexts and situations. It also made it ready for flexible delivery to different apps and across many different platforms and media. But somehow these outcomes never fully transferred over to content. How can we bring this same revolution to content and win the same kind of enormous improvements that would prepare us for the future?

Structured content management enables organizations to store, organize and build their content so that pieces are easily discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. It provides the perfect solution for constructing large, complex documents, but also for delivering modular content to chatbots, portal sites, and mobile apps. But, more importantly, it is also key to future-proofing your content for emerging technological trends.

Join Paul Perrotta, sitting in for Scott Abel, and his special guest, Steffen Frederiksen, Founder and CSO of DitaExchange, for this free one-hour webinar. Attendees will learn what structured content management is and how it works. They will understand what benefits structured content can have for writers, project managers, business owners, IT departments and content consumers. They will also learn how to prepare their content to be fed into new technologies with practical examples from the field.

The trouble with companies is that they're full of people, and people insist on having separate personalities and distinct voices. So, it's no wonder that issues of consistency and tone of voice creep into our conversations when we take an honest look at our content.

Join guest host, Val Swisher, sitting in for Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and her special guest, wordsmith extraordinaire, Marcia Riefer Johnston for a free one-hour webinar during which we'll discuss the role voice plays in unifying a company's content strategy. You'll learn how to build a brand voice without sacrificing the individuality of the content creators on your team. And, you'll discover ways to empower content creators to succeed by participating in a simple, fun exercise.

Documentation leaders are knee-deep in technical communications issues, but rarely get help on people side of the fence. If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Effectively managing technical writers and smart documentation teams requires leaders equipped to tackle an increasing variety of “people issues.” We’re here to help.

Join guest host, Paul Perrotta, and Barry Saiff—Founder and CEO of Saiff Solutions, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Technical Communications Leaders, and a 30-year veteran documentation leader—for a discussion about the staff management challenges that many documentation leaders face but rarely talk about.

Attend this webinar to learn how to you can overcome some of the most difficult-to-solve "people issues.” You’ll discover a wealth of resources you already have at your disposal to help you resolve interpersonal challenges.

Release notes are a crucial part of customer communication for product companies. It seems too many organizations either do the bare minimum and hope no one notices, or simply accept an inefficient and expensive process. At Jorsek LLC, makers of easyDITA, they’ve been working on their release notes process for easyDITA and they have made some big improvements.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Mike Rice, Customer Success Manager for Jorsek LLC, for this free, one-hour webinar. Mike will take you through Jorsek’s process, tools, and results for the creation and production process for release notes.

Making things easier in TechComm is a combination of process, tools, and methodology. In this webinar, we’ll discuss the way Jorsek LLC thinks about TechComm activities and our general approach to making them easier and more efficient.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Patrick Bosek, co-founder of Jorsek LLC, for this free, one-hour webinar. We’re going to look at specific examples in future webinars — but first, we’re going to focus on the methodology, as it is perhaps the most important piece. The total mindset of "easier," (for us, our co-workers, and our customers) in TechComm is essential to being competitive in today’s world of technical publishing.

Attendees will learn how to identify things that can be made easier, how we think about improvement in our TechComm activities, and how DITA enables continuous improvement.

The Content Wrangler Channel covers the people, methods, tools and technologies designed to help you deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time, on the right device, in the right format and language. Your content is your most valuable business asset. Let us show you how to manage it efficiently and effectively.